I swot at cobwebs as I break through huge spider plants and flowering cacti, reed palm, elephant ears, rubber plants and various varieties of dracaena. I once had all these but I used to clean the dust off my leaves, whereas she doesn’t.
“All of them, Julianne,” she demands, and I go back for more water, returning to the room to once more battle my way through the maze of greenery, darkness and cobwebs.
I start sneezing and she doesn’t seem affected, watching me to make sure I water everything. I have to make several trips back for more water before she’s satisfied I’ve done enough.
I put the watering can back in the kitchen and announce abruptly, “Time’s up. We have to go.”
I pick up the carrier containing all of Lilah’s cleaning equipment and notice beneath the cloths and wipes, there’s more than cleaning equipment in here. There’s also medicine, bandages, antiseptic and packets of dissolvable stitches.
What’s wrong with Hilda?
Is Lilah playing nurse to Hilda because nobody else will? Won’t she allow anyone else to touch her?
“What’s wrong with you?” I turn, still holding Lilah’s carrier of medical supplies, the duster on top just covering what’s beneath.
“I want to die with dignity.”
“You want to wallow in your loneliness, that’s what you want.”
She takes a ragged breath. “You don’t know what it’s like to deal with grief.”
“Oh I do.”
“No, you don’t. Have you ever lost that one thing that made you better?”
I nod my head, yes. “My mother.”
“I’m not talking about that sort of grief, I’m talking about losing the person you’re meant to spend your whole life with.”
“Warrick’s always been in my heart,” I say, touching my chest where his love burns, “we were apart once or twice, but even then, we were together.”
“Ha. But he was alive. I’m taking about grief, real grief. When he really is gone, never to come back.”
I don’t like the way she’s looking at me and insist. “I really have to go.”
She blocks the corridor with her chair. “I don’t think so.”
“What do you want from me?”
“To warn you. Nothing lasts forever.”
“What?”
She smiles a smile I only have one adjective for: evil.
“You’re the second wife, the mistress, until you’re not. You’re the same as her and then, his eye will wander.”
“My husband isn’t like that. His first marriage wasn’t right. It was a failure.”
She smirks, sniffs, and even points at me with glee. “He says that, but if he could go back and put himself back in his younger mind, he’d remember he once loved that woman with all his heart. She was his sunrise and sunset, the yin to his yang, the alpha to his omega. The end and the beginning.”
I swallow. It hurts Warrick was married before. It’ll always hurt, but I have to believe it’s me he now loves. I have to believe it.
“She knows. Oh, she knows,” Hilda nods, so sure of herself, “there’s only one way to disrupt your happiness in a way you will never recover. She knows just how to do it and she’s been practising it. Hate’s swelled her heart so full, you won’t even see it coming. Put yourself in her shoes and imagine mistakes were made, losses endured, and now you have to sit and watch while the love of your life makes anew with someone else. She’ll tire of waiting for your happiness to collapse like theirs did, and she’ll take matters into her own hands. When she does, he’ll remember what he really is and he’ll revert. He’ll seek a new mistress to evade everything he is. It’s what men do.”
Lilah appears in the hallway behind Hilda. “Jules, we really have to go.”
“I know. She won’t let me leave.”
Hilda smirks again and shifts to let me pass. As I leave with Lilah by my side, Hilda shouts after us, “Ask yourself what a fallen angel is, and only then will you understand why a fallen angel can administer to the fallen men.”
“I hate her,” I tell Lilah once we’re back outside, in the open air again, the door shutting on that foul house.
We walk across the courtyard and it’s sunny again, a rainbow breaking through the clouds after a slight spring shower.
“She’s full of hate. Don’t let it breed in you, too,” Lilah warns me, “just try to forget about her.”
“How do you put up with her, day after day?”
Lilah begins driving us away and answers, “I pity her. She has nobody left in the whole world and her family all abandoned her, years ago. Her sons and daughter, her grandchildren, her friends.”
“Why?”
We get back on the motorway. “She only knows pain. She’s full of pain. She’s a tragedy of her own making.”
“She once loved?”
Lilah nods. “I expect so, although with Hilda, you wonder whether she was ever innocent… she’s become so ancient, so burdened, so hard. It makes you wonder what life did to her, doesn’t it? I can’t imagine her any other way.”
“She enjoyed that I had to clean up her mess, didn’t she?”
Lilah nods. “I was going to do it.”
“She wanted me to fail, to falter, didn’t she?”
“Oh yes.”
“I won’t. I won’t ever fail and falter, not in front of someone like her.”
Lilah sighs, shaking her head, and whatever thoughts she has, she’s keeping most of them to herself. “Jules, she thrives off that. Don’t let her. Please don’t let her win.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jules
Our morning rounds continue. Following Hilda, it’s a young man who came to England from Pakistan only six months ago. He’s disabled and came to live with his uncle, thinking it would be a better life for him here, where healthcare and benefits are plentiful. The young man lost his legs to meningitis so he’s not without urges, I notice, as Lilah and I help him in the bath.
He’s very talkative and jolly, which I find surprising. He speaks English really well. He lives in a small, three-bedroom house with ten other people who are mostly out at work, all the time. There are children who live here with Danesh, but they are out at school it seems.
“Don’t you get lonely, staying here by yourself all day?”
“A little. I sign up for courses online. One day, something good will happen for me. It has to.”
He’s so positive, it’s a delight after sitting among the crypt of Hilda’s dead life earlier today.
Lilah helps him dress but he’s really capable. He is strong enough to lift his own weight so I reckon we’re just here as a precaution, just in case he falls or something.
“Jules, Danesh has cereal and toast for breakfast, plus a banana. We’ll be down in a moment.”
“No problem. No tea or coffee or anything?”
“Juice, please,” he asks, his eyes twinkling. As I leave the room, his voice carries down the corridor behind me and I overhear him say to Lilah, “When I get my legs, my prosthetics I mean, I’m going looking for someone as lovely as she is. Woo-eee.”
I snicker and consider texting Warrick to let him know he has competition.
I reach the kitchen and find it in a state. I don’t know where to start. Thankfully there is a dishwasher. Most rented places do have them these days. I start loading it and clear a small space on the sideboard. This place really needs bleaching from floor to ceiling but instead, I use some anti-bac wipes on a small area I can work in for the time being.
Opening the fridge, I see plastic tubs piled high, containing ready-made meals that can be nuked straight away whenever someone comes home to eat. As I’m filling a bowl with Danesh’s cereal and sniffing the milk, someone enters the house through the front door, no doubt a worker coming off shift.
“Hello,” he says, entering the living/dining area. It’s a man of around fifty, possibly the uncle. He eyes me suspiciously, then notices my uniform. “You help Danesh?”
�
��I do.”
“Okay. I go bed. People needing taxis tire me out.” He laughs and trudges up the stairs.
Danesh has a bedroom on the ground floor at the back, which he shares with two kids who sleep on a bunk opposite his single bed. There are two bedrooms upstairs and the downstairs bathroom appears to have been added as part of a house conversion. It’s really a two-up, two-down with a big rear end.
Danesh pushes his chair up a ramp and enters the kitchen with Lilah not far behind him. He smiles when he sees me and pushes his wheelchair right up to the table. He has a fairly lightweight contraption he seems to wheel around with ease.
I place his breakfast before him and watch him wolf it down. He must use a lot of energy everyday in lifting and carrying himself and studying his online courses or whatever it is he does.
“What’s the ambition, Danesh?” I ask casually as I pile pots up, ready to go in the dishwasher for the second round.
“Computer programmer.”
I turn, standing by the sideboard, my arms folded.
“You any good?”
“Oh, yes.” He smiles again, his eyes narrowing when he spots the twinkles on my ring finger.
“Can I give you some advice?” I stare at him, trying to seem gentle.
“Go on.”
Lilah looks across at me, wondering what I’m doing. She loads the washing machine with his clothes and appears to be happy just listening in on our conversation.
“Be friends with the lady, first. It works out better that way, trust me.”
“He’s a lucky asshole, hmm?”
He chews his toast angrily.
“No actually, I am the lucky asshole. He rescued me.”
Danesh laughs loudly, tipping his head back. It’s infectious and Lilah shakes her head, berating me.
“You have a sense of humour.”
“That helps too, Danesh. Don’t worry, there’s a special lady out there for you and she’ll whip you off your prosthetic feet.”
He howls with laughter, tears leaving the corners of his eyes.
When he catches his breath, he smiles and whispers, “Thank you.”
We clear up in the kitchen as best we can and help Danesh back to his room where he stations himself at a PC surely twenty years old.
“You laugh, but I will take over the world,” he says.
“See you Danesh,” I say, waving goodbye as Lilah finishes up in the kitchen.
“Hopefully soon, Jules,” he says, blushing a little.
Outside, I tell Lilah, “He was sweet.”
“Shame isn’t it?”
I purse my lips as we belt up in the car parked right outside his house, sitting in the middle of a row of terraces. “I don’t know. He seems happy.”
After Danesh, we have a few cleaning jobs. Seems like there’s more to this than ministering to the frail and disabled. We have half an hour for each place and Lilah tells me, “Just do your best. We’re only given this time. We can only do our best.”
The first house has an inch of dust, everywhere. The place stinks of fish and chips, and it’s not surprising, because the family work in the fish and chip shop next door.
The lady of the house, a mother to three children employed in the family business, has Lupus and has struggled for months. She’s laid upstairs in bed but I say to Lilah in a whisper, “We need more than half an hour.”
“We’ll be back next week so we can make it perfect then. Today we really just need to get the surface muck off.”
We do our best but I feel like everything is smeared with dust, and we’re just smearing it round. We’re only given the downstairs to do but it’s awful. I couldn’t live like this.
“Why don’t her kids help out?”
“Don’t think they live here. All grown up.”
“SO?”
Lilah shrugs. “You know how it is.”
If my mum was still alive, I wouldn’t have her living like this. Why doesn’t her husband help?
Anyway, we do our job and Lilah leaves a cup of tea on Mrs Oswald’s bedside table before we leave, which isn’t in the contract but Lilah does it anyway.
Our next cleaning job is at an impeccable home, where a man lives alone in a six-bedroom house on the edge of town. “Hello girls,” he greets us as we walk in. It’s a man in his eighties or nineties but he seems mobile, welcoming us into his house, no crutches or a Zimmer frame. I notice as we enter the living room, he keeps everything he needs in one place – bed, radio, books, magazines, spectacles, stacks of wine bottles in one corner and a huge, 50-inch TV.
“Do your worst, then girls.”
Lilah gestures we head for the kitchen and everything is gleaming.
“How is…?”
“He doesn’t really need a cleaner, just some company,” she says, popping the kettle on. His kitchen is really lovely, with walnut units and glass cupboard doors. Everything is built-in and you can tell he’s put some money down to have this all built nicely.
“He’s alone?”
Lilah helps herself to some posh Lady Grey teabags and I nod. I love Lady Grey but always feel guilty buying the nice stuff when normal tea is half the price.
“Seems like he always has been.”
Lilah makes three cups of Lady Grey and places an array of biscuit treats on a tray, too. I notice all he has in his fridge is butter, milk and bacon, and all he keeps in his cupboards is whisky, biscuits, sweets, bleach-white bread and cakes. He’s my kind of man. We head through to where he lives (in that one room) and we all sit before the big TV, watching BBC News 24.
“Terrible world, init, terrible,” he mumbles, “them bloody terrorists, I can’t pronounce ’em, but they’re terrible.”
Bless him.
“Biscuit, Len?” Lilah asks.
“No, no, I only get them in for you. The tea, too. I wouldn’t bother otherwise.”
I reach for a packet of jaffa cakes and groan, “I’m so hungry, Len, we’ve been worked like dogs all day.”
“I imagine.” He winks, his faculties all there.
“Where do we start cleaning, then?” I ask, clearly the most naïve of us three.
Lilah shakes her head. There will be no cleaning today.
“Least let me shine your plants, or something?” I ask Len, entreating him. I feel guilty for popping six jaffa cakes all at once, without so much as lifting a finger in return.
“You can take a bottle of wine, young lady. Hell knows I won’t drink it. Can’t stomach the stuff these days.”
I stand and inspect his pile, licking my fingers of chocolate. It’s so nice to sit in a room where I’m not thinking about what types of bacteria I might be taking home for my children to get infected with.
“So why all this wine, if you don’t drink it?” I kneel down and inspect his pile.
“If the house goes up, then at least I’ll definitely go up with it, won’t I?”
I snicker and grin at him. He grins back, light in his ancient eyes. He could be eighty, he could be 180. Who knows? He seems to be one of those people who defies ageing.
“You’ve got some good years, Len. I might have even picked the grapes this one came from!” I show him a New Zealand Cab-Sav and he puts his glasses on to read the label.
“You’ve been?” He squints at the year. “2013?”
“Yep. I was picking them for three months before I did a short summer school there, teaching English.”
He narrows his eyes and Lilah nods, as if admitting I am more than a glorified nursemaid.
“Wow,” is all he says.
“Can I take this? My husband will find it amusing.”
“Sure, you can have it. Take two. In fact, Lilah should have one as well.”
Lilah holds her hands up, firm about her decision. “No, no, Len. You know I don’t drink.”
“Square this one, ain’t she?” He winks, pointing to Lilah sitting in the armchair next to him.
I wet some kitchen paper at the sink and begin wiping dust from h
is plant leaves. He watches me with a hint of anguish, as if he’s disappointed in himself for forgetting.
“I love plants. I think it’s therapeutic, yes?”
He warms to my words and to my smile, replying, “Yes. I agree.”
He has more varieties than Hilda, whose houseplants were mostly green with large leaves.
He has some Chinese houseplants, hypoestes and so many flowering plants, I don’t know the names of them all. Some seem exotic, which makes me think he is like me and has travelled. Also, the femininity of his house suggests he was once married for sure and he keeps this place as a shrine to her memory. The fact Lilah thinks he has always been alone suggests to me he never talks about his wife, nor the loss of her, or what she meant to him.
“You liked New Zealand?” he asks.
“Loved it,” I reply, working on his leaves still, “climate was odd though. You think we have strange weather, but they can have autumn, winter and summer all in the same day. The humidity on the hills was ridiculous some days, let me tell you. The dry was just as bad. There was no in between until you got back to sea level.”
“It was a place I never got to.” He smiles, absentmindedly dipping a biscuit in his tea.
Lilah gawps, like she’s never seen him eat before. He’s skeletal, for sure, but he’s not panting for breath or riddled with veins. He looks healthy, but he’s just lonely, clearly.
Most people don’t realise why humans don’t like to eat alone – it’s built in our very DNA to sit around and break bread together. It’s something evolutionary. A survival instinct. Any other way of living seems to make people ill, and it’s happening more and more in this world of anonymity and seclusion.
“NZ is a place to forget yourself in,” I tell him, “where life seems to thrive and people really live, not just exist. Maybe I look on it all with nostalgia now because I was a holidaymaker, but there’s something gone wrong in this country, I can feel it now I’ve come back. It’s something that won’t be easily healed.”
Beyond Angel Avenue Page 22
